Google Panda is a change to Google's search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of "low-quality sites" or "thin sites", in particular "content farms", and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.

The change is implemented in order to eliminate ‘low quality’ content, or in other words, spammy content trying to rank in the search engines. The Panda update has affected sites like Mahalo, Ezine articles, Wisegeek and a lot of other websites. I was personally surprised that Ezine articles was affected because they do look over and edit their articles although perhaps quite loosely.

Google has announced that the latest version of its panda update — a filter designed to penalize “thin” or poor content from ranking well — has been released.

Google said in a post on Google+ that a “slow rollout” began earlier this week and will continue into next week, before being complete. Google said that depending on location, about 3%-to-5% of search queries will be affected.